Dark, witty dystopia offers no answers

Zed

Joanna Kavenna Doubleday

When novelist Joanna Kavenna was recently asked what subject she found most challenging to write about, she answered: “General reality. What is it? Who decides? Is it just the physical things we can see and touch? Atoms, no atoms? Thoughts only when they become deeds? Whose thoughts? (Whose deeds?)” Her newest novel, Zed, doesn’t answer these questions, but rather asks them over and over again, until what begins as a familiar addition to the dystopian or techno-horror genre becomes far stranger and more appealing.

There are notes of both Catch-22 and 1984 in Zed, although where the first two focus on government control and endless war, the latter centres on government control and a technocratic corporation called Beetle. By 2023, Beetle, founded by Guy Matthias, has become so integral to the smooth running of Western society that it’s basically taken over, using predictive algorithms not only to help people shop for the right things but also to arrest them for future crimes.

Beetle is, of course, committed to maintaining a fair and free democratic society with plenty of choices for everyone. When meeting with Beetle’s Chinese counterpart, Matthias becomes upset about how far ahead its AI predictive technology is, especially because “the Chinese intended, with these sorts of protocols, to control their populations, rather than merely inspiring them to make more fulfilling choices, for themselves and wider society.”

This kind of irony is par for the course among Kavenna’s often humorous descriptions: a simplified version of speech that eliminates the messiness of nuance by stripping away superfluous words is called Bespoke; and Beetle markets virtual reality as Real Virtuality. But Kavenna’s cleverness doesn’t come at the expense of the book’s depth. Rather, her wit helps ease readers into what becomes a novel of ideas.

The story begins when an ordinary man named George Mann does something utterly unpredictable: He kills his wife and children before wandering along the Thames and falling asleep on a bench. None of the algorithms predicted this, and it’s a PR nightmare for Beetle, which is supposed to prevent such unpleasantness. The mess is compounded when a robotic cop shoots an innocent bystander sitting at a table Mann had just vacated.

As more events unfold beyond the predictive abilities of any algorithm, Beetle’s employees begin to label such events as “category Zed.” Beetle tries to explain that Zed events don’t count because they weren’t predicted, and thus were impossible to predict, which means Beetle isn’t really at fault even if its own machines are out there shooting people, because the fault belongs to people getting shot for being unpredictable.

Definitive answers are dangerous, Zed suggests. But in asking the questions, we come to understand something about being messy, uncertain and human.